I was kind of chuffed, in that blows-against-the-empire way, last week to find one of the various strongmen who rule much of the world taken down a peg at the polls. As Anjali Mody reported from Chennai, India, “After a decade of increasingly unchecked power, Narendra Modi has been cut down to size.” The Hindu nationalist prime minister didn’t lose, exactly.
After the votes were counted in the world’s largest democracy he’s still in power, for his third term, one of those Putinesque players who clearly wants to serve a life sentence in the office. But not only did his self-founded party do far worse than it was expected to do before the election — a “thumping victory” was predicted — he no longer even has a majority in parliament and will have to form a coalition government. These are not the kinds of results your religiously inflammatory, anti-Muslim, authoritarian despots like to see.
Like the czar wannabe in the Kremlin, who surrounds himself with Orthodox icons and archbishops in his formerly atheist state, Mody writes of Modi: he “recently claimed that his birth was not a ‘biological’ event but that he had been sent by God.” But the Indian people weren’t buying his second coming bit any longer. Still, yeah, you couldn’t be more right that it’s only my clearly delusional perpetual optimism about progress in this world that could make me believe we’re really on the road back to worldwide actual democracy we thought we were on when the Sovi.
